Dreams: an Act, IC students and immigrant workers…

Rally! Rally for a living wage for dining service workers at Ithaca College! Meet at 2:15 at the Ithaca College Pub. We’ll be marching from the pub, escorting students from LIPS to their meeting with President Rochon. Music, instruments and solidarity as we try to convey to the IC Administration that the entire community supports a living wage for all!

Happy Day for young, born-in-the-USA people whose parents are undocumented workers: The Dream Act passed in the House yesterday. Onward to the Senate!  Here’s a press release from Make the Road New York.

Another exceptional story has appeared in Buzzsaw Magazine, Ithaca College’s alternative news magazine, about the J-1 Visa Program. This program enables foreign students to travel to the US for educational reasons, earning a small salary at the same time. This appears to be something most of us would support but the question has arisen: how are these workers treated? are jobs given to these students, sometimes taken advantage of, which would be filled by full-time residents?And how do the corporations — like Cortland’s Marietta Corporation and the Holiday Inn, two local businesses that use J-1 Visa workers — benefit?

Pete Blanchard, an IC student who has worked with the Workers’ Center on projects before, and Samantha Wolfe, our IC intern last year, investigated J-1 visas. They stayed in a motel in Cortland to get to know the workers there. Read the article in the most recent Buzzsaw.   The illustration below is by Sam Pinto of Buzzsaw.